The Job Underneath the Job

When I founded Autessa, I knew exactly what I wanted to spend my time on. I wanted to build the platform and talk to customers. The rest, I figured, would sort itself out.

It did not sort itself out.

If you want to skip ahead to what we built about it: the Small Business Kit.

#A Tuesday afternoon

It is a Tuesday afternoon. You are in the middle of a customer call that is going well, and your email pings, and you glance at it, and it is a contract from a vendor that you need to sign by the end of the week. You make a note to look at it later. The call ends. You open the contract. It is fourteen pages. You start reading. The first three pages are fine. On page four there is a clause about liability that you do not understand. You read it twice. You still do not understand it. You think about forwarding it to a lawyer, but you remember that the last time you did that the bill was eight hundred dollars for two hours of work, and this contract is for three thousand dollars of services, and somewhere in the back of your head you know the math is not working.

You put the contract down. You will come back to it.

You do not come back to it.

On Friday morning the vendor emails you asking if you have had a chance to review. You apologize. You spend an hour that afternoon reading the contract carefully. You sign it. You are not sure about page four, but you sign it anyway, because the alternative is starting another conversation you do not have time for.

A small piece of you carries that contract for the next year. Every time the vendor relationship comes up, your mind goes back to page four.

#The sinking feeling

Here is one I did not see coming.

You are at your desk. You have just gotten an invoice from your lawyer. The invoice is for more than you expected. You feel a small flush of stress, because the lawyer's bill was supposed to be smaller this month. You open your accounting platform to figure out how to pay it. While you are in there, you glance at the receivables tab. There is a customer who owes you money. They were supposed to pay two weeks ago. They have not. You do the math in your head. The lawyer's invoice you just got is roughly the same amount as the customer invoice that has not been paid. You sit there for a moment.

You should send the customer a follow up. You know you should. You also know that this is the customer you have been hoping will sign a bigger contract next quarter, and the last thing you want to do on a Tuesday morning is be the person asking them where their check is. You write the email in your head three different ways. None of them feel right. You close the tab. You will send it tomorrow.

You do not send it tomorrow.

The cash in your account is fine, technically. But the gap between the cash you have and the cash you are owed is wider than it should be, and the gap is widening, and there is no manager you can flag this to, because you are the manager. You are the only person in the company who is currently feeling this feeling. Everyone else is doing their work. The fact that the company has cash to pay them is your problem, and only your problem.

This is the part of being a founder that nobody warned me about. Not the work, but the loneliness of the work. The feeling of being the only person in the building who is currently watching the runway.

#The lack of a manual

The other thing nobody warned me about is that there is no manual.

When you have a job at a company, somebody has set up the systems. There is a way invoices get paid. There is a way contracts get reviewed. There is a way customer conversations get logged and acted on. Somewhere, someone decided how all of that should work, and you inherited it on your first day.

When you start a company, none of that exists yet. You are the someone. Every decision about how the back office runs is one that you make, and most of the decisions are bad, because you are making them in the gaps between the actual work, and you are making them with no information, and you are making them while also trying to build a product and close customers and not lose your mind.

I would catch myself, sometimes, doing things in obviously wrong ways. I would find a contract sitting in my drafts folder for ten days because I had forgotten to send it. I would realize I had not updated the CRM in three weeks, which meant I could not actually remember what I had said to which prospect. I would notice that I had been meaning to follow up with a customer for so long that the moment had passed, and I knew it had passed, and I felt a small grief about it, because that customer was probably gone now and it was my fault.

The worst part was not the mistakes. The worst part was knowing they were happening and not knowing what to do about it. You cannot google your way out of this. You cannot read a book about it. You can hire help, eventually, but in the early days the help is too expensive and the problems are too many and you end up just absorbing the chaos.

#What I heard from other founders

When I started talking to other founders, I realized this was the universal experience. Not in the sense that every founder had the same problems, but in the sense that every founder had this same feeling. The feeling of carrying something heavy and unnamed. The feeling of doing administrative work badly while also doing the actual work badly because the administrative work was eating the time that should have gone to the actual work.

Nobody I talked to was complaining about specific tools. Their tools were fine. They liked their tools. The frustration was bigger than that. It was the cumulative weight of being the only person in a company who is responsible for everything, and who has to learn everything, and who has to do everything for the first time without anyone telling them whether they are doing it right.

Most founders I talked to had developed coping mechanisms. They had a notebook. They had a Sunday ritual where they caught up on email. They had a friend they texted when they got a contract they did not understand. They had a partner who would remind them to send the follow up. The coping mechanisms worked, sort of, the way coping mechanisms always work. They got the founder through the week.

But none of the founders I talked to felt good about it. They felt like they were getting away with something. They felt like the company was held together by duct tape and the duct tape was them.

#Why we love the Small Business Kit

This is the part of the company I find myself most quietly grateful for. Autessa is a platform, and we are always customer zero for everything we build on it. The Small Business Kit is the back office we use to run Autessa, and it changed what my week feels like.

The change was not that the administrative work disappeared. The work is still there. Contracts still need to be reviewed. Invoices still need to be sent. Books still need to be kept. The change was that I was no longer the only one watching it. The contract that used to sit in my inbox for ten days is read by something that knows what to look for, and it tells me which clauses to actually pay attention to before I read it. The customer who has not paid gets a polite, firm follow up in my voice without me having to write it. The action items from a call become tasks before I have closed the laptop. The picture of what is happening in my company is assembled for me, instead of me having to log into eight tools to put it together.

The other thing I appreciate, and we thought about this carefully, is that the Small Business Kit gives you unlimited seats. We did not want a founder to flinch every time they added a teammate, or to ration access because the per seat math got uncomfortable. The thing you pay for is AI tasks, which is the work that actually required human-like judgment anyway. That feels like the right thing to charge for, because that is where the value is. Everything else, including the seats, is just access to the room where the work happens.

The work I love is still there. The customer calls are still there. The hard product decisions are still there. The relationships are still there. Those are the hats I came to wear, and they are the ones the business actually needs from me.

The rest of them, I am happy to leave on the rack.

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See what's in the kit → Small Business Kit